Poor Elijah’s Almanack: Ethics, right and wrong

By Peter Berger

Published
1:45 pm EDT, Monday, June 29, 2015

Public education has problems. More and more students come to school less and less prepared to learn. Less time is devoted to academic learning while schools are expected to function more as social services providers and personal counselors, responsible for everything from diets to “emotional learning.”

Published standards are higher, but the onus to meet those standards falls less on students and more on teachers. More money and teaching time are squandered on hyped assessments that generate more data that tell us less about what students really have learned. Despite soothing rhetoric proclaiming our empowerment, teachers and parents find themselves less in control of their classrooms and schools as districts are forced to consolidate.

On the broader front, many Americans have developed an unreasonable sense of entitlement. The federal government has degenerated into a venue for outlandish candidates to announce their bids for elective office. Authorities can’t determine whether the Affordable Care Act has made healthcare more or less affordable. The landmark law’s merits aside, the Supreme Court red-penciled Congress for its “inartful drafting,” meaning the nation’s highest lawmakers wrote it badly.

Wall Street vacillates daily, rising on good news that somehow seems bad and falling on bad news that somehow seems good. The Internet is completely secure, provided you don’t count the millions who’ve lost their assets and identities to hackers. The IRS and the Navy are using hardware and operating systems that I, scarcely a cutting-edge computer person, replaced generations ago.

Conduct by relatively few police officers and the vicious act that visited South Carolina have induced discussions of race relations in the twenty-first century. The voices that seem to get the most airtime, though, contend either that nothing has changed or that everything has changed, both insupportable positions. Meanwhile, the most powerful Constitutional republic on Earth can’t find a way to even try to keep firearms out of the hands of homicidal maniacs.

While, upon reflection, schools by comparison aren’t doing that badly, there’s plenty we could do better. If I were to pick something that schools and students need, however, it wouldn’t be a new “model code of ethics for educators.” The proposed code, known in eduspeak as MCEE, is the creation of the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification, also known as NASDTEC.

Based on its members’ expertise administering the state licensing regulations that commonly make it more difficult to renew teaching credentials than a license to practice medicine, NASDTEC laments that each of our fifty states has enacted its “own laws and rules,” including “separate measures of what constitutes misconduct.” The fact that enacting those laws and rules is by design one of the prerogatives of statehood under our federal system seems to have escaped them. This bias reflects the hypocrisy of education policymakers who pay lip service to individuality in fashions like “personal learning plans” as they simultaneously impose increasing uniformity on the classrooms, schools, and districts charged with delivering that individualized education.

MCEE proponents argue that adopting a nationwide ethical code will make it easier for teachers to “internalize” what’s expected of them, “regardless of where they practice.” This makes as much sense as saying I could better obey the posted speed limit in Vermont, where I do live, if it were the same as the posted speed limit in Arkansas, where I don’t live.

It also ignores the fact that education hardly suffers from a shortage of ethics codes. The Association of American Educators, for example, updated their copyrighted 1994 document this year, too.

The seven-page MCEE itself is a typical expert compilation of common sense, nonsense, contradictions, elements that have little or nothing to do with ethics, and conduct that’s none of anybody’s business. We didn’t need a new code to inform us that plagiarism is bad or that we shouldn’t “engage in romantic or sexual relations with students.” On the other hand, entering into a “personal” relationship with a former professional colleague is an entirely private matter.

“Monitoring and maintaining” my physical health is a good idea but likewise isn’t the province of professional ethics. Neither is “actively participating” in professional organizations, “promoting technological applications,” or “advocating” to local taxpayers for “adequate resources.” Lobbying for “equal access to technology” means purchasing home computers for every student. That’s more a political and economic issue than a barometer of my professional morality. Much of the code is similarly tainted by jargon promoting the current fashions in education reform.

How can teachers be responsible for using “validated,” “developmentally appropriate assessments” when we have no control over standardized testing? How can I “uphold” policies “regardless of personal views” while simultaneously “supporting decisions and actions that positively impact teaching and learning”? What do I do with my “personal views” when a policy negatively impacts my students?

NASDTEC asserts that MCEE will ensure that “children will be safer in classrooms.” Unfortunately, another irrelevant piece of expert-drafted, “best practice” rhetoric won’t do anything to protect children against the actual dangers that trouble most schools or alleviate the real obstacles that impede learning.

Anyone who works in a public school classroom knows this. Anyone who doesn’t shouldn’t be writing the rules.

Ethics is a matter of doing what’s right.

That’s something you can’t do unless you face what’s really wrong.

Peter Berger teaches English in Weathersfield, Vermont. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.